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Katana and mocha creators win technical Oscars

Mocha 3.0 in action. The creators of Imagineer Systems’ planar tracking system, used in movies including the Harry Potter series and Black Swan, have won one of this year’s nine Scientific and Technical Academy Awards.

The developers of Katana and mocha are to be awarded Scientific and Technical Academy Awards in this year’s ceremony, due to be held at The Beverly Hills Hotel on 9 February.

Steve LaVietes, Brian Hall and Jeremy Selan win an Academy Certificate for the creation of Katana, the scene-management and relighting software developed at Sony Pictures Imageworks and now sold by The Foundry.

Theodore Kim, Nils Thuerey, Doug James and Markus Gross’s demo of wavelet turbulence from Siggraph 2008. The fluid simulation technique was later adopted by the developers of Blender’s new smoke simulation system.

The remaining awards go mainly to technologies developed at large studios, including Light, PDI/DreamWorks in-house lighting software; Tissue, Weta’s physically based character simulation framework; and the pose space deformation technique developed at Centropolis and Disney.